Monday, April 5, 2010

President Barack Obama raised $2.5 million for the Democratic National Committee Thursday night, but his trip to Boston had another, less publicized purpose — saving Deval Patrick.

Few politicians are as close to Obama as the Massachusetts Democratic governor or have deeper ties to the president and his core team of advisers.

And almost no one faces a tougher reelection battle this year than Patrick, whose disapproval ratings would be considered near-terminal if not for the three-way race that he currently finds himself in.

As a result, the White House is looking to every weapon in its arsenal to help Patrick win a second term.

Patrick has been at the White House at least a half-dozen times in the past year, whether he’s lunching with senior adviser David Axelrod, dropping by the Oval Office for a chat or attending Obama’s first state dinner.

The Massachusetts governor is the only Democrat besides Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and party-switching Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) to get the president to headline a personal fundraiser for him more than a year before the November election. Obama’s former campaign manager, David Plouffe, has been consulting for Patrick’s 2010 bid since last spring, and Axelrod also has lent his expertise.

“We want to be as helpful as we can to him,” said Axelrod, who worked on the Massachusetts governor’s 2006 campaign.

“The same things that attracted me to Barack Obama attracted me to Deval Patrick,” Axelrod said, “this sense of public service as a calling and not a business and the sense that we have to break out of the old political paradigms of hyper-partisanship and special interest-dominance and bring about real change.”

The intense White House interest in the Massachusetts election is more than just business — it’s personal.

Patrick and Obama, both Harvard Law School graduates with Chicago roots, have a history together that dates back almost two decades. They first met in Chicago, at a time when Obama was a community organizer and Patrick, who grew up in a tough South Side neighborhood, was working in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department under President Bill Clinton.

Years later, Patrick supported Obama in his Senate campaign. Obama returned the favor in 2006, when Patrick was running for governor, his first-ever bid for public office.

In October 2007, Patrick reached out to Obama and, against the advice of some political advisers, informed his friend he’d decided to endorse him over Hillary Clinton. The safe political play for Patrick — who’d been in office less than a year — would have been to let the contest unfold. But he decided to take the risk at a critical time for the then-Illinois senator’s struggling presidential campaign.

Obama and his team flew to Boston the following week.

“Not only did we do the endorsement, but we did a rally on Boston Common and there were 20,000 people there,” recalled John Walsh, Patrick’s 2006 campaign manager who is now chairman of the Massachusetts Democratic Party.

So it was hardly a surprise when more than 800 words of Obama’s speech Thursday were dedicated to gushing about the governor. As he did at a Patrick fundraiser last October, Obama reminded the donors just how close the two men are.

“Deval stood up for me,” Obama explained, early in the Illinois Senate campaign when nobody knew his name. Later, Patrick came to his Senate office and told him he wanted to run for Governor.

“And I thought to myself, ‘Well, this guy is crazy. He’s not going to win. He’s never run for anything,’” Obama said. “But then I thought to myself, ‘Well, yes, but he supported me when I was doing this stupid thing running for the United States Senate, so — and I like him — so, what the heck.’”

Politics isn’t the only thing they have in common. They share similar personal backgrounds, with each raised by a single mother and forced to come to terms with a strained relationship with a distant father. Both are married to attorneys and have two daughters.

They are also trailblazing, post-civil-rights era African-American politicians of roughly the same age who rode similar hope and change themes to victory — “Yes we can” for Obama in 2008; “Together we can” for Patrick in 2006. Their messages were close enough that in one much-publicized 2008 speech, Obama even borrowed nearly exact phrasing from a 2006 Patrick speech.

It is precisely those thematic similarities — not to mention some shared political experiences — that have spawned theories that Patrick’s re-elect will be a bellwether for how Obama fares in 2012.

“Deval Patrick is the canary in the coal mine for Barack Obama in 2012,” conservative Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr wrote in January.

Mary Anne Marsh, a Democratic strategist in Massachusetts, believes that if Patrick loses, “many people would say, ‘This is the way to try to beat Barack Obama in 2012.’”

The president himself invited comparisons Tuesday in his remarks at the Boston fundraiser.

“The campaign Deval Patrick built is the same campaign for change that you and I built across this country,” Obama told the Democratic crowd. “I’ve come to tell you tonight that we have kept faith with those beliefs.”

The notion of Patrick’s campaign as a dry run for 2012 is rooted in the idea that both politicians took office with ambitious first-term agendas and huge expectations based on the historic nature of their victories and Democratic control of the executive and legislative branches in Boston and Washington.

Both found that the euphoria surrounding their victories began to fade with the daily grind of governance and difficulties in making the adjustment from campaigning to governing. Both men saw their poll numbers drop, particularly among key independent voters. The economic downturn only added to their challenges.

Patrick, however, has had a much harder go of it than Obama. The president has been able to point to significant accomplishments — among them health care reform and the economic stimulus bill — enabled by the luxury of being able to run a deficit. He is still popular within the party, and his poll ratings remain respectable.

Patrick, meanwhile, stumbled through controversy during a rough first year and has been forced to make unpopular decisions to maintain a balanced budget in tough economic times. One of the issues he’s being hammered on this year is not making good on his campaign promise to lower property taxes.

“As candidates, they were both in tune with what people were worried about, with their concerns, what they were looking for, what they wanted. And that in large part helped them get elected because they not only understood that; they were able to communicate that,, and people really believed in them and trusted them,” said Marsh, the Democratic strategist. “And it seemed when they both got into office, and they went tone deaf, politically.”

Those close to Patrick aren’t buying into the idea that his election offers any insight into 2012.

“What happens in 2010 will say something about what happens in 2012, but the truth is that between 2010 and 2012, there’s probably three or four or more political lifetimes,” said Walsh, the state party chairman. “The overwhelming dynamic I see out there is this anxiety that voters have, and it sort of combines in with an impatience at the pace of change.”

Axelrod laughed when asked if Patrick’s reelection campaign is a referendum on the hope and change platform.

“No, I think every election is unique and has its own qualities,” he said. “If you’re someone who’s committed to bringing needed change, that’s additionally burdensome.” He said he believes Patrick’s campaign, and ultimately Obama’s, will be affected more by timing and the economy.

“I don’t view this as some sort of a canary in the coal mine sort of thing, but I view it as the effort of a very, very good man governing in difficult times,” he said.

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